Archive for April, 2016

Age: The decision on Sunday to approve mining leases for Queensland's Carmichael coal mine is akin to "evil", according to one of the world's foremost marine scientists.
"It defies reason," said Dr Charlie Veron, former chief scientist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science. "I think there is no single action that could be as harmful to the Great Barrier Reef as the Carmichael coal mine."
The $21.7 billion project, which involves mine, rail and port facilities, would allow Indian multinational...

Blue and Green: Activists today peacefully protested against a planned mega dam project in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest at the annual general meeting (AGM) of the Austrian company Andritz, one of the global leaders in technology for hydroelectric dams. The São Luiz do Tapajós-dam would be built in the Tapajós River, in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon. In the early morning, 50 Greenpeace activists from Slovenia, Poland, Slovakia, Croatia, Austria and France constructed a 10-meter replica dam in front of the...

AAP: Australia is unlikely to meet water quality targets designed to protect the Great Barrier Reef, researchers from the federal government’s marine science agency have warned.
Scientists, including two from the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), have published a study that says current efforts to reduce pollution run-off into the reef’s waters are not enough to meet set targets.
Their findings, published in the Global Change Biology journal on Sunday, came as the Queensland government...

AAP: Conservationists and traditional owners have been floored by Queensland’s decision to grant mining leases for Adani’s mega-coalmine while two court challenges are unresolved.
The Queensland government has cleared the last major state hurdle for the Indian miner to proceed with its $22bn coalmine (which would be Australia’s largest), rail and port project in the Galilee Basin and at Abbot Point.
But even Adani says it won’t make a final investment decision on the project until legal challenges...

AAP: The Queensland government has granted three mining leases for Adani’s multi-billion dollar Carmichael coalmine, which will be the largest in Australia.
Environmental groups say the mine will fuel global warming and compound threats to the world heritage-listed Great Barrier Reef amid one of its worst coral bleaching events on record.
The premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, and the mines minister, Anthony Lynham, made the announcement in Mackay on Sunday.
The premier put the value of the project...

Agence France-Presse: A controversial India-backed giant coal project near Australia's Great Barrier Reef was Sunday awarded mining leases, but developer Adani said it would not commit to a final investment decision until legal challenges against it were resolved.
The Queensland state government said the Aus$21.7 billion (US$16.7 billion) project to build one of the world's biggest mines was awarded three leases.
"This is a major step forward for this project after extensive government and community scrutiny," Queensland...

Slate: Sea level rise--perhaps the most consequential effect of climate change--just got a whole lot more urgent. If you live near the coast, this is your wakeup call.
In a study released Wednesday, a new estimate of how much Antarctic ice would melt in a warmer world nearly doubles previous projections of sea level rise by the end of the century. And it might be even worse than that: The study did not explore the true worst-case scenario, and its lead author said the work is still incomplete. Taken...

Intercept: AS NEGOTIATORS from around the world gathered in Paris last December to draft an agreement to slow down climate change, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz was holding a hearing in Washington, D.C., to highlight the work of climate skeptics.
The hearing allowed Cruz to rail about “suppression of dissent, driven politically by global warming alarmists” and equate the widely accepted science of climate change with “partisan claims that run contrary to the science and data and evidence.”
Cruz was ridiculed in...

ClimateCentral: Even as the number of Americans relying on the Colorado River for household water swells to about 40 million, global warming appears to be taking a chunk out of the flows that feed their reservoirs.
Winter storms over the Rocky Mountains provide much of the water that courses down the heavily tapped waterway, which spills through deep gorges of the Southwest and into Mexico.
But flows in recent decades have been lighter than would have been expected given annual rain and snowfall rates - and...

New York Times: Misconception: Climate change is not real because there is snow in my yard. Actually: Anyone who utters an argument like this is mixing up climate and weather. When Senator James Inhofe famously threw a snowball across the Senate floor in an attempt to undermine the validity of climate science, people who practice that science for a living pretty much rolled their eyes. Yet the Republican senator from Oklahoma, chairman of the environment committee in the Senate, is hardly alone is mixing up weather...

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